Connie Chung, from series "Untitled Newswomen (Joan Lunden, Jane Pauley, Connie Chung, and Diane Sawyer)"

Robert Heinecken built a career out of irreverent, often shocking, images skewering contemporary issues from the Vietnam War to pornography to the omnipresence of mass media. Although photography was central to his practice, he rarely used a camera to make his pictures, relying instead upon the appropriation of existing images. Here, he made a cumulative portrait of the newscaster Connie Chung by taping a sheet of photographic paper to a television set placed in a pitch-black room and turning the TV on for several seconds; that image was later scanned and produced as a digital print. The resulting picture, pixelated and blurred, evokes the predictable conventions of the evening news and the mediating power of television.